Risks when your low code app becomes too complex

Low code sounds like a great idea but there are some caveats. One of those problems are that applications, over time, tend to grow in features, complexity, and corner cases.

IT professionals have the tools to deal with such problems, for example:

• version control
• continuous deployment/continuous integration
• unit testing
• production, staging, and development environments
• refactoring

The risk that you might encounter when creating a low code application on some platform is that your application becomes so large and complex, that you end up needing this kind of tools in you low code application platform. Some platforms already include such features, others not. If you are building your own, you should carefully consider if you need or will need to include those concepts.

On the other hand, low code tools are supposed to be so simple and fast to use that even if you make a mistake or need to refactor something or you need to overcome the complexity by sheer mind power, since you are going 10x faster than normal “high code” development, you are still ahead of it.

If your use case is complex enough, you might end up having a solution that is not as low code as you intended, i.e. there is still a lot of code. However, the number of lines of code is still much smaller than the “high code” alternative, you have still won.